June 24, 2009

What color is Twitter?

En route to another thing I'm working on, I built a little color scraper that scans the Twitter public timeline for words describing colors. Any word that is a CSS3 web color name (which some of you graybeards may remember as similar to, but not exactly, the X11 colors), is detected and the corresponding R, G, B triple is saved. For example, consider the following tweet:

Finally found the WoW Mt. Dew Game few...the red one is good, but the blue one tastes like ass...

Because I only grabbed the first color in a tweet, the above results in red (255,0,0). Getting a few hundred of these took a day (6/24/2009), as the Twitter API limits how often you can query it. Consequently, most color tweets were missed. However I got enough to make the picture above, where every pixel corresponds to a tweet mentioning that color.